


A Green Christmas

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: A Darker Gotham [2]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/F, Rape Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:49:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5607457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An altered Harley and an inhuman Ivy struggle to learn how to live with each other as Harley heals from the Joker's tender loving care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Green Christmas

The scrum of her hair parted into twin ponytails, Harley stood, her body the thin clapper in a sweater bell, and watched the snow fall blankly. Behind her, Ivy crooned to the evergreen shoot she’d bought into the abandoned home they were squatting in. With a groan and crackle, the shoot sprouted into a tree, its boughs twining over the cold fireplace and sending green fingers across the stained plaster of the ceiling. Outside the window, the snow fell up, down, and sideways, the long lines of the buildings around them only periodically visible under the hollow howl of the wind. The tree persuaded, Ivy punched a small hole through the rotten floorboards and planted a sprig of her namesake, again singing it into rampant life, shoring up the cracks in the walls and turning the cold and moldy living room into a small, verdant arbor. The room warmed, more as Ivy built a fire in the fireplace, the convection currents making the leaves of her plants whisper.

Harley leaned forward against the half-hidden pane of glass, her forehead numbing as it lay against the window. In deference to her, Ivy left the radio on the fireplace mantle on, the murmur of the announcer somehow a lifeline. Her eyes closed, Harley listened to the announcer talk about the blizzard, cheerily named Janice, and estimates of the volume of snow being dumped on the city.

After a moment, Harley looked down at her arms where they dangled. The ridge of manacle scars around her wrists slowly faded as her body warmed, going from an angry red-purple to simply red. The familiar knobs of her knees were still scabbed, her feet slowly blushing from their purple tinge to edge themselves in rosy red. They were distant, somehow both at the end of her legs and miles away. The big, bluish bruise on her right shin had not faded yet, and she absently shifted her leg to feel its comforting heat.

Behind her, Ivy moved to another room, leaving behind the nose-prickling perfume of pine oil. Harley turned slowly to look at the room. The pine and ivy had swallowed the walls, tendrils and branches dug into the decaying house to shore it up and leaving only small patches of leprous plaster. The room had been reduced to a small ball, the floor a maze of roots that had considerately left an empty space around her bare feet. As she watched, a root sent questing fingers toward her. When it found her foot, it curved, laying gently against its edge and sending spears through the floor.

Harley had seen Ivy’s plants rip a man in half. She had no idea what, but it was obvious Ivy had done something to her or the plants that told them to leave her alone. After a moment, the window had been swallowed entirely, the ivy layering itself protectively over the window as if to encase them both.

Ivy was like that, something Harley hadn’t expected. Ivy cared very little for most humans and very much for plants, but the same vicious and protective mothering she applied to plants apparently applied to the few people Ivy decided to care about.

One of Ivy’s drones stepped carefully into the room, a junkie whose ardent pursuit of oblivion had changed to worship of a green goddess. Wordlessly, he handed her a mug of coffee made precisely how Harley liked it and shuffled out to carry in a moth-eaten, but still comfortable armchair. He placed it crookedly before the fire. Harley controlled her flinch as the wood of the chair thudded down on the chaotic tangle of roots across the floor, but it was a close thing. The drone dribbled slightly, his smile exposing the blackened roots of his teeth, and patted the chair.

Harley sighed. When Ivy assigned a drone to a task, they literally couldn’t do anything else and would eventually become distressed if it couldn’t be completed. Depending on the drone’s personality, their distress could become violent and always made Harley feel a bit like she was kicking a puppy. She picked her way across the roots and sat on the chair, rocking it backward across the root it straddled. The drone made a snuffling noise and shuffled back out of the room.

When Ivy came back in, trailed by the drone, she found Harley absently balancing the chair on the root so that it was even, none of its legs touching the floor. Harley stared blankly into the fire, watching the knots of flame join and fly apart. The light cast warm life across Harley’s pale face, picking the bag of her black eye out into harsh relief. Ivy watched Harley breathe, the air filling Harley’s battered lungs, with a wrath that felt Biblical—had she been able to get her hands on the Joker’s horsey features, she would have shoved a seed up his nose and used it to slowly rip him in half.

Harley looked like a skeleton, old and new damage like the careless slash of red and purple paint against the fragile symmetry of her bones. If Harley had been a plant, Ivy would have been curled protectively around her, singing the gentlest of songs to knit her back together.

The radio crackled, the painfully shrill and human sound of the announcer reminding them both that it was Christmas. Ivy searched the vague and cloudy remnants of her humanity for something fitting, something appropriate to Christmas and soothing to Harley. She’d already sent a drone out to mug strangers until he had enough money for a Christmas feast.

For Christmas gifts, she’d had drones collect weapons. It was what Ivy would want if she’d spent years under the thumb of the Joker and did not have the plants to keep her company.

Something was still missing, and it nagged at Ivy. Harley hadn’t moved, her breathing setting the chair to a gentle rocking that faded quickly as Harley adjusted her weight to keep the chair balanced. After a moment, Ivy reached into the pouch at her waist and emerged with a handful of seeds. Selecting a few, she closed her hand around them, concentration wrinkling her face into a scowl.

She had recently discovered that, with a bit of effort, she could alter any seed to become another. It was tiring, but in this case necessary.

With a shaky breath, she opened her hand. Leaning down, she gently bent the roots of the pine tree back, clearing a broken space in the floorboards a foot above the frozen soil. The tree wouldn’t last long in this weather, but with encouragement she could keep it alive for a few tired weeks. Using the heat of her body, she thawed the soil in a small, round space and dug her fingers into the soil. The song she sang to the seeds poured out of her in a roar, the shy green leaves following the sound of her voice and shooting toward the groaning ceiling.

The resulting shaggy, reddish tree groaned and leaned hungrily toward the heated brick of the fireplace. Ivy cleared her throat and it shed a curl of bark, filling the room with the sharp, warm scent of cinnamon. She patted its trunk, feeling the sap surge sluggishly under her hand and thanking it.

The response was filled with regret and a fierce longing for warmth. She promised it she would keep a seed and plant it elsewhere, and the tree gave her the equivalent of a resigned sigh, dropping a seed pod into her waiting hand before subsiding into silence.

When she turned, Harley was watching her.

“Whatcha doing, Ives?”

Ivy blinked, then shrugged. If Harley had not figured it out, it was not worth mentioning. With an errant thought, the pine curled a few roots up to form a seat for her. Ivy sat down in the cradle of the tree, leaning back gratefully against the ridges of its trunk, and went back to watching Harley, who was not a plant and required something Ivy was not entirely sure how to give her.

Harley flushed and went back to staring into the fire. When a drone shuffled in an hour later, trailing melting snow, he found them drowsy from the heat. He grunted, breaking their reverie, and hefted a double armload of bags.

“You will have to direct them,” Ivy said carefully. “I don’t remember how to make human food.”

The drone’s green-glazed eyes ticked over to Harley, who flinched, then stood. Just outside the door, three more drones waited, arms similarly full. The plastic loops of the bags cut into their arms as they waited and Harley wished, not for the first time, that Ivy had retained something a little more like empathy.

They parted for Harley, arranging themselves into a ragged column and shuffling into the kitchen behind her. Ivy had encased the house in plants, the interior rapidly warming and becoming humid, and the kitchen counters were covered in a tangled mass of roots, vines, and leaves. She let them put the bags down, directing them to sit at the sprouting kitchen table so she could sort through the groceries they’d bought. The mix was eccentric beyond belief. Primarily vegetables—Ivy apparently considered starches an afterthought—and the single hunk of meat the drones had purchased was elderly and slightly dried out.

Harley sighed. She’d been able to convince Ivy to pick a house with a working oven and had turned the gas back on with a trick she’d learned from one of his henchmen. His.

Her stomach clenched, thoughts skittering panicked in the bowl of her skull as the razor sharp edge of one of his cheekbones lay, for a moment, over the face of the closest drone. Memory, like a flood of acid. His face. His emaciated body. The terrible cackle of his laughter and his fingers like pale spiders crawling over her. The sound of her own voice, moaning.

The drones watched incuriously as Harley crumpled, her fingers knotted in her scalp, breath ragged and gasping. Ivy drifted in, then hovered, frozen in the act of reaching out for Harley, unable to remember how one comforted a human or whether one touched them at all during moments like these. After a moment, Harley forced herself upright, eyes rolling over to Ivy like marbles in the bone cup of her skull.

“Sorry,” she said hoarsely and looked down at the floor.

Ivy growled and the drones flinched. “No,” she ground out, something approaching hate filling her with icy heat as Harley flinched again. This time, she did cross the space between them, the vines she wore beneath her clothes tearing holes in them and reaching out with her arms to cradle Harley’s fragile body. She could feel Harley’s heart hammering against the tendril that lay on her throat, each terrible hammering a condemnation of that man, each a petition that Ivy would gladly have answered by giving Harley the naked, diseased wrinkles of the Joker’s brain in her cupped hands.

She needed to destroy him, to feed his body to her plants in excruciating segments, to watch him as they wormed through his veins, tearing him apart a millimeter at a time until he could no longer laugh at anything. She would keep his skull, polished by the vines that tore him to bits, as a trophy.

The vines wound tighter, responding to Ivy’s thoughts. It took a panicked gasp from Harley to remind Ivy to make them stop winding the two women together into a cocoon. Ivy’s eyes focused on Harley’s pale face, on the white rims of her eyes.

“Ives,” Harley gasped. “Ives, please.”

Ivy stood, watching her for a moment, watching the faint green sheen of Harley’s skin grow darker with her distress. She’d changed Harley just a little bit without asking her that first night as Harley slept, changing her chemical structure to make the plants understand that Harley wasn’t food and to encourage her to heal a little faster, to shore up the breaks in her bones and the terrible thinness of her skin. The damage she’d found as she sent questing, millimeter thin tendrils through Harley’s unconscious body had awakened every protective urge Ivy had ever had and encouraged her to do something she would never have believed she would do.

The unasked for result of Ivy’s pity had been to make Harley just a little like a plant. Just enough to make Ivy completely unable to ignore her as she did most humans.

With a thought, the vines loosened, retreating to their lazy curls on Ivy’s body. Neither woman moved.

Ivy jolted, a scrap of human memory prompting her. “Sorry,” she said, the words alien on her tongue. “Sorry, Harley.”

Harley smiled, a wary, faint thing. “’S okay, Ives. I know it’s ‘cause you care. It’s just scary sometimes.”

Ivy’s blush was a dark, forest green. She was the first to step back in unaccustomed embarrassment, an emotion she didn’t realize she still possessed. One of the drones handed her a turnip and Ivy bit into it, filling the awkward silence with the crisp crunch of her teeth as she ate the root.

Harley turned toward the stove, the snap of the lighter blooming into the hiss of flames. A drone handed her a pot and she filled it with water. Ivy watched as she ordered the drones to chop the vegetables up, the table shaking under the impact of butterfly knives, switchblades, leaf-blades and the contents of her drones’ pockets. The resulting vegetative slaughter was any number of sizes, and Harley emptied it into the pot.

Harley cut the meat herself with a short sword produced nearly bashfully by one of the drones. Their worship of Ivy had transferred, in some cases, to Harley. Harley could not command them as completely as Ivy, but they listened to her as the plants did.

The stew burbled away and Harley turned from it to lean against the root-choked counter. Ivy took the last bite of her turnip and dusted her hands off against the tattered coat that hung from her. A vine curled in her red hair, pulling it up into a messy bun. Harley watched it anchor the bun. Ivy never quite seemed to get dirty, something about her vegetative state seeming to absorb dirt rather than wear it.

It was a luxury Harley wished she could share. She looked down at the mud spattering her bare legs with a sigh.

“Hey, Ives, do you suppose there’s any way I could manage a hot bath?”

Ivy blinked, then headed off toward the bathroom to encourage the vines to withdraw from the huge, claw-footed bathtub. One of the drones went lumbering away to light the pilot light on the dilapidated water heater and another wandered out into the still chill of the night, returning an hour later with a pair of towels, tags still on and lightly dusted with broken glass. Harley wrapped his bleeding knuckles with a rag and he sat at the table with a grunt, joining the circle watching the roiling surface of the stew. She left a drone stirring the pot periodically and joined Ivy in the bathroom, which had sprouted lavender while she had tended the drone. Ivy sat on the toilet lid, talking gently to the lavender.

Harley paused in the door. Ivy was, to be fair, making rather a large effort. Harley wasn’t sure what Ivy intended, but it was clear that she was trying, above all, to be pleasant. For Ivy, all this fussing was practically an invitation to set up house—her drones died regularly of neglect, Ivy’s focus on her plants so exclusive that she often forgot to feed the humans who enacted her will.

Harley’s lips pressed together tightly. She missed privacy. She missed being able to shut others out, to possess her own space. This would never have occurred to Ivy, whose removal from humanity was nearly so complete as to make her another species.

Harley really didn’t feel like trying to explain, and for a wonder, Ivy’s attention stayed on the lavender as Harley stripped and ran a steaming hot bath. When she got in, the lavender dropped several sprigs in with her, the sharp smell only stronger from the hot water.

When Harley looked up again, Ivy was watching her. “What is it like,” Ivy finally said, innocent in her curiosity. “I don’t remember any more.”

Harley could feel her eyebrows meeting, her face furrowing. Sometimes, Ivy made her incredibly uncomfortable. “Dunno, Ives. What’s it like for you?”

Ivy leaned forward, trailing her fingers in the water and closed her eyes. As Harley watched, the water level in the tub went down, the water absorbing into Ivy’s pale green skin. Ivy’s eyes opened, lids heavy.

“It is easier,” she drawled, voice heavy. “It flows easier.”

Ivy’s vines ripped the last fragments of her clothes from her. Without asking, Ivy clambered over the lip of the tub, spilling water across the gnarled floor. Harley shrunk back from her, drawing her legs up. Ivy’s eyes stayed closed and the water level dropped precipitously.

“Ivy, goddamn it.”

When Ivy’s eyes opened, Harley was huddled against the far side of the tub, eyes wild.

“Goddamn it,” Harley repeated, voice shaking with the arms she’d curled around her shins as panic beat a klaxon inside her chest. “Ask first.”

That blush again, unaccustomed heat climbing Ivy’s cheeks. Her mouth opened and closed repeatedly as she desperately scoured her human memories, unable to find anything that would amend, or fix, or even instruct her. Ivy stood, vines rustling in her agitation, and tried to climb out.

Harley’s hand on her shin stopped her. “Ives,” she said, voice still trembling, “sorry. I know you’re trying.”

“I can’t remember,” Ivy whispered, vines drooping. “I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do now. I can’t remember how to….” Her voice trailed off as her shoulders hunches, vines hugging her closely.

“I can’t remember,” she finally whispered, “how to be human.”

Harley looked up at her, the fat lump of her black eye half-closing her eye. “I can’t remember either, Ives.”

Harley’s eyes closed. If she had been able, she would have cried, but the desert inside her had scoured away everything but a sere blankness and the terrible storms of memory.

“I ask,” Ivy said hesitantly. “I am asking. I want to remember.”

She could not make herself say why.

Harley’s fingers tightened on Ivy’s shin and Ivy sat down in the few inches of water left in the tub. A vine uncurled itself, turning the taps behind Ivy to let more water into the tub. With an effort, Ivy stopped absorbing it, letting the tub fill around them and watching Harley uncurl her stiff arms and legs to sit, knees forced up by the tub rim. When the water was dribbling over the rim of the tub, Ivy turned it off with the same vine and waited, watching the lavender travel the small currents of movement as they both breathed, trembling the steaming surface of the bath. The heat flushed them both, coaxing tension from Harley.

It was all Ivy could do not to drink the hot water in, not to make the vines burst into a jubilant flower crown out of the sheer pleasure of the heat after the cruel fingers of winter had scoured them bare. To her annoyance, a single flower popped into life anyway, cuddled into the messy heap of her hair, defiantly grateful to be warm.

Harley took a deep breath. “So,” she said, drawing the word out. “So, this is nice.” She watched Ivy through the thick fringe of her eyelashes.

Ivy merely waited. The whole evening, the unaccustomed effort of being hospitable, of trying to please someone hinged on whatever Harley might say, whatever it was that Harley was thinking.

Harley looked at the single white star of jasmine in Ivy’s hair, its sweetness drowning in the spice of the lavender. It wasn’t like Ivy to have poor control of her plants, and she’d seen the brief flash of irritation that crossed Ivy’s face when the thing burst open. She wasn’t sure what kind of vine Ivy wore—it produced, at various intervals, anything from fruit to the flowers of several species. Rather like a living mood ring than anything else, it was very nearly the only visible proof that Ivy still had emotions.

And what emotion was a single, pale explosion of sweetness in Ivy’s haystack of fiery red hair? The whole thing—growing a home of fragrant plants, the tinny mutter of the radio from the other room, the drones that had fetched rather nice towels, the nodding heads of lavender—was what?

Ivy merely watched her, the vine moving lazily beneath the water between them. It reminded Harley of tentacles—uncanny, but not unpleasant, much like Ivy herself.

Well, it was nice. It was strangely nice, and strange was the operative word.

Harley couldn’t stop herself. Second guessing the emotions of the people around her was as much survival instinct as it had been her profession. Surviving the man—she refused to think his name—meant trying to understand his moods. So she analyzed. She had to.

Effort. The effort to be pleasant. Whatever alterations had made the plants friendly to her without making her a drone. Ivy’s willingness to try. Harley tried on and discarded a variety of solutions. Attraction was laughable. Pity was barely plausible. Interest might be possible, but that could mean anything.

Harley finally spoke. “Is it pity, Ives? Is it interest?” Her arms rose, dripping, from the water. “Why bother?”

Ivy shrugged. “It started out as pity.”

Harley winced. In some ways, Ivy’s directness was a relief—if you wanted to know what Ivy was thinking, all you had to do was ask. In others, it was slightly painful. One of the things Ivy had apparently left behind a long time ago was tact.

“What is it now,” Harley asked, eyes searching Ivy’s placid face.

Ivy’s head cocked and the plants in the room broke into urgent whispers, vegetative distress. “I’m not sure,” she finally said.

Harley eyed the plants, which subsided like children caught talking in class, their heavy heads turning away. Ivy glared at them for a moment before turning back to look at Harley again.

A combination of fear and curiosity made Harley brave, her voice barking. “I don’t believe you, Ives.”

The whispers started again. On Ivy’s head, the vines uncoiled, letting her hair fail in a heavy flood. They rubbed against each other and knotted, caging the flower. Ivy hissed, eyes rolled up to stare up the line of her forehead and they subsided.

“I don’t,” Ivy started, then stopped, shoulders squaring. “He needed to be stopped.”

Harley scowled. “There’s that pity.” She glared at Ivy. “Since when do you feel pity, Ives?”

From the faint fog of memory, Ivy’s humanity showed her a jagged mirror—a couch and the reverberating bellow of an angry voice. As Harley watched, the vines grew wicked thorns, hardening with Ivy’s skin, which grew black, iron-like bark. Ivy’s back hunched, her silhouette elongating against the wall. The water flooded out of the tub, running away from her as she grew and Harley shrunk back, finally clambering over the lip of the tub to cower behind it. The plants in the room hissed, the walls they clung to groaning from the pressure.

“Ives,” Harley screamed. “Ives, please!”

The burning eyes Ivy turned to her had absolutely nothing in common with a human gaze—the pupil was swallowed in a poisonous green that seemed to smoke in the humid air. Outside the bathroom, the drones moaned, the meaty thud of their fists against the door making the hinges squeal.

“Ives,” Harley screamed again.

When Ivy spoke, her voice was the bass rumble and crack of roots tearing through concrete. “Enough.”

The drones stilled, the banging of the door stopping. Harley watched as Ivy absorbed the bark, the vines shrinking. Ivy shook herself, human-green eyes focusing on the huddled shape of Harley with an expression which very nearly seemed to be regret.

They took a slow breath in tandem, the sound echoing in the silence with the pattering sound of drops spilling over the edge of the tub.

Ivy spoke, words slurring with sorrow. “Not pity.”

Harley’s voice was faint. “Then why?”

Ivy said nothing, her shoulders slumping again. The look on her face was pleading, eyes searching then falling. “I can’t remember,” she murmured again. “I can’t remember what it’s like to be human.”

“Ives,” Harley said, standing to a wary crouch, “you aren’t missing much.”

“I’m missing enough,” Ivy said quietly. “Enough to have scared you.”

Harley watched her again, straightening, a strange expression on her face. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, voice deliberately light to make a joke of it, “I’d say you cared.”

Ivy’s head drooped to her knees. She stayed there for a moment, then peeped up at Harley from the snarl of her hair. Her voice was inaudible, drowned in her hair. Carefully, ready at any moment to bolt, Harley edged closer, catching the tail of Ivy’s voice.

“…’member Christmas. Wanted to make it better.”

Harley nearly fell forward. “Jesus, Ives,” she said, astonishment making her voice harsh, “I didn’t… I mean, I didn’t realize it mattered.”

 _I didn’t realize I mattered that much to you_ hung in the air between them, turning pink from sheer exasperation at being unsaid.

The look Ivy aimed at her was one part embarrassment and two parts irritation, the vines waving over her head in a giant, vegetative shrug. Harley watched Ivy’s toes curl, the faint green tinge paling over the bone until they matched the enamel of the tub.

Her long-neglected training as a psychiatrist kicked in, and Harley made a decision. With only the faintest of tremors in her knees, she climbed back into the tub, wincing at the lukewarm water. Ivy’s vines turned the water back on, but the hot water tank was exhausted and the water was chill as the outside air. Ivy turned it off by hand to give herself something to do, letting the water swirl out of the newly opened drain. Harley’s hands opened and closed like flowers where they rested on her knees.

“Ives,” she started slowly, “when did you change?”

Ivy tilted her head up to rest her chin on her folded arms and raised knees. “Grad school,” she said.

“Did you….” Harley took a breath, searching for the best way to phrase it. “Were you very… social?”

The expression on Ivy’s face said only too clearly that Harley had forgotten grad school if she could ask that question, the memory coming in clearly without the need for any coaxing.

 Harley’s lips quirked up in a half-smile. “All right, stupid question.”

Ivy’s shoulders raised, some of the tension draining out of her at the sight of Harley’s smile. She shifted, the vines drifting down to twine in her hair.

“I guess I just wondered why you bothered with me,” Harley said, eyes ticking over Ivy’s body and waiting to see if she transformed again. It could be loneliness, as unlikely as it seemed to apply such a thing to a woman who had little use for humans outside converting them to drones. Harley couldn’t picture Ivy having a social life, couldn’t picture Ivy dating or even picture Ivy as the child she knew Ivy had to have been at some point. It was impossible to think of Ivy having a mother and father, let alone siblings or any of those sorts of ties to the human experience—Ivy seemed almost to have sprung into being from the earth itself, and Harley had to remind herself through sheer will that Ivy was, on some level, as human as Harley was herself.

Ivy merely watched her think. It took Harley a moment to recognize Ivy’s expression as mildly confused, shocking her.

“You know what, Ives,” Harley said, “it doesn’t matter.”

The lie, and it was a lie—Ivy’s motivation mattered to Harley’s survival, something her time with that man had hammered into her—was a social nicety. Harley was not sure that Ivy recognized it, but Ivy relaxed again, the shadow of a smile creasing her mouth.

 _Thank you is too small_ , Harley thought. _Way too small for this and way too trite_.

Ivy spoke, her voice soft and melodious. “I liked you.” The vines moved around her, tendrils caressing the air between them. “You treated me like a person.”

Harley had met Ivy only a few times during her rotations at Arkham. The isolation chamber they’d trapped Ivy in was complete, filtering even the air to a sterile halo around Ivy, who sat huddled in it. Harley had found it sad, even after seeing Ivy’s dossier, to see her surrounded by empty steel and glass, isolated from the world around her. The vines had hung lank on Ivy’s naked body, dispirited and depressed, and Harley had been unable to stop herself from feeling empathy for Ivy and anger at the crude comments of Ivy’s guards.

 _So maybe this is payback_ , Harley thought. _What a payback for such a little thing_.

“You saved me,” Harley blurted, surprising herself.

Ivy shrugged again, her vines echoing the movement of her shoulders. “I like you,” she repeated. After an awkward pause, she spoke again, the words dragged out of her mouth. “I made some changes.”

Harley supposed she should be angry about it—Ivy hadn’t asked, hadn’t checked to see if Harley wanted to be changed, if she wanted someone probing and molding her again. She wasn’t entirely sure how Ivy found her in the alley he’d left her to die in, or how Ivy had transported her to that first house. All she knew was that she’d awoken to Ivy’s face over hers and the crushed mint smell of the plants beneath her. Ivy’s first words to her had come a day later, after Harley’s hysterics and panicked attempts to escape, which were thwarted by Ivy’s plants.

Ivy’s words had been a two word apology, and no more had been forthcoming for at least another week. Even then, Ivy was often taciturn. Her answers were more apt to be actions than actual words.

Ivy had done something, perhaps just to keep the plants from killing Harley. It bothered her, but it was hard to stay angry at Ivy, considering what she had done.

“So you made the plants be nice to me.” Harley’s voice was deliberately, carefully casual, the tone climbing as Ivy looked away, refusing to meet her eyes. “What else did you do,” Harley ground out, suspicion sharpening her voice.

Ivy refused to answer, hunching again.

Harley’s eyes widened and she looked down her naked body, searching for something, some sign of change. Her skin was somewhat paler, sure, but that could be the season. Her hand patted down her body, feeling nothing—no change, just the skin she was accustomed to feeling. Maybe less pain, but….

Harley’s eyes narrowed and her eyes arrowed over to Ivy. “Did you change the way I heal? Did you change the way my body works?”

Ivy hid her head in her arms, very nearly a ball cupped in the narrow walls of the tub.

“You did.” Harley realized she was on the ugly edge of panic. “What did you do, Ivy?”

Without conscious intention, Harley reached across the space between them, grabbing Ivy’s arms to pry them apart. “What did you do?”

The shrillness in Harley’s voice snapped Ivy’s head back, meeting the blue of Harley’s eyes and the accusing expression of her face. The faintly green tinge of Harley’s skin was pronounced, made more obvious by her furious flush.

Ivy cleared her throat, a human expression of discomfort she’d forgotten she knew. “I… err…”

Harley’s face kept darkening, fear and rage distorting it as her fingers tightened on Ivy’s wrists.

“You were broken,” Ivy said, her voice carefully soft. “You were all broken on the inside and you weren’t healing.”

The rage faded from Harley’s face like a shot, leaving a terrible blankness. Her fingers and arms went limp, falling to her thighs with a slap. Ivy reached for her with hands and vines, gentle and inexorable.

“You were broken,” Ivy repeated, “and I made you heal.”

The vines caressed Harley’s face, trying to rub warmth back into her. “You needed to heal,” Ivy whispered. “You needed to be strong. I made you stronger.”

Harley’s dead eyes turned to her, personality slowly flowing back into her face. “What am I,” Harley whispered back, mouth dry.

“You’re Harley,” Ivy said. “Just… stronger Harley.”

“Am I,” Harley said, enunciating carefully, “still human?”

Ivy blinked, a Morse flurry of dots to conceal the flash of hurt Harley’s words lit in her chest. She had not known it would matter so much to Harley, that Harley would be offended or want to cling to her humanity. “Does it matter,” she finally asked, a note of pleading in her voice, her vines twining in Harley’s hair beneath the tight clutch of her ponytails. “Is it so important?”

They stared at each other.

Harley finally cried at that. She could not have said why. Why that, how it somehow broke the sere emptiness inside her, what it meant, the whole overwhelming mass of it breaking over her like the fury of nature denied. She barely registered the vines twining around her more tightly, lifting and turning her so that Ivy could wrap her arms around them both, the sympathetic whisper of the plants as they leaned toward them both as if the house itself could curl itself around them, to protect and comfort.

Ivy waited through the racking sobs, through the gagging, wrenching spasms that shook the whole bathtub. She wanted to split herself open like one of her plants and hide Harley inside her, to encase her in warmth and safety until nothing could touch Harley any more. The last parts of her humanity nagged at her distantly, and when they had her attention, spat out a single word.

Ivy refused to acknowledge it.

When Harley quieted, Ivy spoke again, her chin resting gently on the wandering part of Harley’s ponytails. “Mostly human. More human than I am.”

Harley sighed, her breath stirring the vines curled around them both. “I haven’t felt human for a long time.”

Ivy said nothing. There was nothing to say that would ease Harley, and her fear of being inhuman still stung.

Harley took a watery breath, pushing tentatively against the cocoon of vines around them both. “You know, Ives, we’re kind-of encased here. It’s a little hard to breathe.”

Ivy realized she didn’t want to let Harley go. She didn’t want to pull back the vines that bound Harley to her so closely that they could breathe together, chests rising and falling as if a single heart beat in them both. The desire to keep Harley there was alien but incredibly comfortable, as if Harley was supposed to be there, fitting neatly into a space Ivy had not known she possessed.

It was hard to part the vines, to let Harley pull away from their cradle and to reabsorb their meshed tendrils. It was almost painful, but Harley appeared to need the space, turning to face Ivy and watch the vines slowly melt back into the familiar green lace that cupped Ivy’s body.

“Ivy,” Harley said, smearing her face with the back of a hand with a hiccup. “Ives, how do you feel about me?”

Ivy wanted to shrug, but couldn’t. That alien sensation was filling her again, like a cup of warm bubbles that pricked and tickled as they burst inside her.

“Ives,” Harley repeated. “Ives, do you like me?”

Ivy’s vines spoke for her, reaching into the space between them and drawing back at the last moment. Ivy herself made a face—when the other girls had chased boys, she’d been happily buried in the library. While the other students went to parties, she huddled over a microscope in the lab. While they’d chatted idly about how was sleeping with whom, she’d been secretly grateful to not be a part of their never-ending, messy, and ultimately painful pairings. While they were planning marriages, she’d been genuinely happy to plan experiments. A romantic relationship had never held enough attraction for her to seek it out when she could be seeking knowledge.

Ivy had been burned enough times in professional partnerships to be wary of anything that caused or increased her dependence on someone else.

But there were the bubbles, warm and tickling, the vines between them reaching over and over to recoil at the last second. Ivy was not dumb, neither was she incapable of understanding what that feeling probably was.

She just had no idea why it had showed up now, in her thirties, with a woman who had been the Joker’s battered toy for years.

“Ives,” Harley said, voice gaining the oddly clinical distance of her profession, “Ives, are you gay?”

The tone of Harley’s voice irritated her, conjuring as it did the asylum and all the classifications, like straightjackets, they’d weighed her down with. One of the vines thumped Harley on the leg, responding to Ivy’s irritation without conscious effort.

Harley squeaked, losing her clinical distance. “All right, fuck you, Ives.” She rubbed her shin, glaring at Ivy, who glared back.

“Don’t,” Ivy growled, “analyze me.”

“Don’t hit me,” Harley growled back.

Ivy sniffed, opting to pretend the exchange hadn’t happened. “I don’t know. I never really found anyone attractive that way.”

“What way?” Harley still rubbed at her shin, fingers going over and over the small, fading red mark.

“That way.”

“Did you date, Ives?”

Ivy’s glare sharpened, the first bumps of thorns rising on her vines. “Don’t analyze me.”

After a moment, Harley raised both hands in surrender, then folded them in her lap with a sigh. “How almost human is human?”

“You’ll heal faster,” Ivy said grudgingly. “And plants will like you. Maybe animals, too, since you won’t smell like a human unless you use their chemicals. Your bones are denser. You might be stronger than you were, and you’ll probably be a bit more flexible. Your ligaments were already pretty stretchy but I made things a bit more springy by repairing the collagen with collagen harvested from one of the drones.”

As Harley watched, Ivy’s gaze grew distant, her vines curling and uncurling in thought.

“I corrected a few hormonal balances,” Ivy said, voice sharpening as she thought back. Her hand shot out into the distance between them, fingers stirring the air. “When I changed, I found it was more efficient to store master copies of my cells in structures throughout my body to prevent copy errors. I also found that I could exude neurochemicals from my mucous membranes. It wasn’t very efficient at first, but then I remembered spores. Once I altered the protein layer on the outside of the cells so that it could be carried on spores, the neurochemicals helped me make the drones. It also helped me figure out how to make the presence of certain hormones stable. I made more of those little structures so that I could produce and store phytochemical copies of the hormones, and set them to disperse into my body automatically at certain levels. Took me awhile to get it right, since I was using phytoestrogen instead of estrogen, and phytoandrogens instead of androgens. I finally had to covert my reproductive system and parts of my pituitary gland. It was just easier than converting phytohormones after producing them.”

Ivy took a breath and shook her head. “Took a bit longer for you since you’re still using estrogen and androgen instead of their phytocounterparts, but I successfully created production and storage structures in you, as well as making some improvements in your nutrition adsorption, shedding and regenerative processes.”

Ivy blinked, focus coming back to the disbelief on Harley’s face. “You’ll age more slowly,” she translated. “I made you a little younger and a lot quicker to heal.” The silence stretched out long and demanding. “I’ll have to check on you ever so often, because the mechanisms I added to allow you to reabsorb and reuse damaged cells are experimental.”

Harley’s fingers crept up to her black eye, her tone accusing. “Why haven’t I healed that?”

Ivy reached toward it, then settled her hand back in her lap. “It was a shattered eye socket,” she said, voice scrubbed of emotion.

Harley’s mouth hung open in shock. “Oh,” she said weakly.

“Three broken ribs, a shattered eye socket, internal bleeding from ruptures to the pelvic wall, several poorly healed knife wounds, a stress fracture to your right hip, a green-stick break to your left shin, scarring from various burns, stress-induced partial baldness and a stress-induced ulcer, vaginal and anal tearing, and an STI.” Ivy’s voice was calm. “You have some bruising and your hair will be thin for a little while longer, but most of the damage was fixed in the first 24 hours you were unconscious.”

She paused. “I learned quite a bit about my own ability to alter cell plasma during that period. Parts of you are a little bit provisional, but the mix should be fairly stable. It was a good job.”

Harley simply sat, too stunned to cry or feel anything.

“I am going to kill him,” Ivy added, matter-of-factly. “I think I’ll rather enjoy it.”

Harley’s face was bloodless. At some point during the years she’d spent with the Joker, she’d simply stopped analyzing the damage, her medical training only reminding her of the cost of his attentions. Hearing someone else list the damage made it realer, made it hurt again, her body twinging.

“Harl,” Ivy said, abruptly deciding that she too would use a pet name, that they were too close not to. “It won’t happen again.”

Harley could feel hysterical laughter bubbling up behind her teeth and ground them together to keep it in. Hysterics. She would not give in to hysterics. She would not give in to the urge to start screaming. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

Ivy watched Harley’s eyelids flutter helplessly over her bloodshot eyes as she fought to control herself. “Harl,” she barked.

Harley’s eyes rolled toward her, the pupils opening and contracting with the ricochet of her thoughts.

“Harl, it won’t happen again.”

Harley’s fists knotted, fingers digging into her kneecaps, and she shook herself, trying to fling the creeping numbness of shock from her body. Ivy’s hands curled around hers, prying them off her knees and wrapping them in her own. Harley watched them, desperate for something else to think about, something that was not what had happened to her.

Ivy’s hands were calloused, unsurprisingly, the nails short, nail beds spring green. Her fingers were muscular, neither long nor short, and the vine that had crept up her wrist traced patterns on the back of Ivy’s hand. Harley watched it make shapes, counting her breaths until her heart slowed, until her thoughts were lucid.

When she looked up, Ivy’s expression was gentle and oddly knowing.

“Harl, I don’t know if I am gay. I don’t know if I am interested in anything like that.”

Harley took a breath, tension running out of her. She wasn’t sure she could bear being used, being touched that way, and some part of her had been afraid that Ivy’s attention would come with its own cost, a lesson the Joker had beaten into her until it felt like reflex.

“I don’t think,” Harley stuttered, “that I could….”

Ivy’s hands caressed hers. “You don’t have to.”

Harley pulled herself together with a painful amount of effort. “Besides,” she said, utterly failing to keep her voice light, “I’m not sure what I’d do with all those vines.”

Ivy let go of her hands gently, deciding to forgive her for the way Harley shrunk back from Ivy’s vines and her new inhumanity. “They don’t have to get in the way.”

Harley reached out to lay a shaking finger against the nearest one. “No,” she said, “I suppose they don’t.”

The vine curled around Harley’s finger and squeezed once before retreating. Ivy stood slowly, stepping out of the tub to grab a towel and tuck it around herself, a vine holding it closed. After a moment, Harley followed her, taking the other towel. Ivy padded out of the door, drones shuffling out of her way. With a yelp, Harley ran past her into the kitchen to ruefully prod the burned stew.

“Shit!”

Ivy followed her in and eyed the gluey mess in the pot. With an imperious snap of her fingers, the drones poured into the room and she sent them out into the night, Harley yelling a reminder for them to feed themselves as well and to pick up some clothes.

Alone in the house, they looked at each other. Ivy turned, the towel fluttering, and stalked into the living room. The big pine grumbled and curved itself into a chair as Harley resumed her position in front of the fire place. With an irritated huff, Harley pried the rubber bands from her hair and started the process of trying to unsnarl it with her bare hands.

Seconds later, Ivy handed her a comb shaped from the pine. As Harley yanked the snarls from her tangled hair, swearing, Ivy sighed, then stood and plucked the comb from Harley’s clutching hand. Without a word, she grabbed a hank of Harley’s tangled hair, her vines sectioning what they could.

Harley froze, then slowly relaxed as Ivy systematically, patiently detangled the matted riot of her hair. With a sigh, she leaned back in the chair, looking at the pale triangle of Ivy’s chin and her scowl of concentration. By the time Ivy had worked the majority of the knots out of the fried, angry mass of Harley’s hair, Harley was flushed with pleasure.

Ivy eyed her. “We should cut much of it off and let it regrow. It’s mostly chemical-fried, and some of it is burnt. The parts I made grow back in will take awhile to get to any length.”

Harley nodded once, the idea of shaving it all and starting over oddly appealing. A minute later, her scalp was a bed of downy blonde fluff that felt a million times cleaner, as if she’d been able to shave off years with her hair.

Ivy touched Harley’s scalp, a gentle graze that she drew back quickly. “It’s better this way. I could not have saved most of it.”

Harley looked up at her, then reached for Ivy’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Ivy froze, letting Harley hold her hand, letting Harley tell her when to draw back again.

“Thank you,” Harley whispered, and they both knew what she meant.

__________________________________

The drones returned with a burger for Harley, and a mass of clothing which was very nearly deliberate in its inability to match. Harley laughed as she drew a men’s pair of tight white briefs from the pile, a Christmas sweater that was comically ugly, and a pair of thermal underwear. None of the pants in the pile fit either woman, and the resulting fashion disaster was utterly, in Harley’s opinion, fabulous.

Ivy grew her a hammock after she’d eaten the burger, a densely woven pocket of vines that nearly swallowed her.

“This is almost fetal, Ives,” Harley said.

Ivy grunted from her ball in the roots of the pine and refused to respond. The drones slumped around the borders of the room, adding their body heat to the room.

“Got you a gift,” Ivy said, sleepily.

Harley made a slurred humph from her cocoon. “Oh yeah? Whazzit, Ives?”

One of the drones handed Harley a sledgehammer to the sound of her delighted laughter. “I’m cuddling this,” Harley caroled. “It’s my teddy bear.” The leaves of the hammock rustled as she settled the heavy head of the hammer on her shoulder.

“You do that, Harl,” Ivy murmured, falling asleep to the sound of Harley’s fading giggles and the tinny chorus of that damned radio.


End file.
